The Taste of Others

Agnès Jaoui's funny and darkly subversive tale of suburban despair and bohemian angst has successful but dull businessman Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri, who wrote the script with Jaoui) getting dragged along to a Racine play by his spoiled and neurotic interior-decorator wife, Angélique (Christiane Millet). Clara (Anne Alvaro), the actress playing Queen Bérénice, captivates Castella, who only a day earlier had grudgingly hired her as his business-English tutor. What follows is often excruciating to watch: Castella starts to tag along with the party of actors and their art-world cronies, drinking at a trendy dive where barmaid and part-time hash dealer Manie (Jaoui, a Keatonesque beauty) meets and beds first Castella's hapless driver, then his brooding bodyguard. Castella's English lessons with Clara are torture, as she struggles to help him while ignoring his puppy-dog eyes. Clara's friends bemusedly tolerate Castella's unwitting "faggot" comments and mock his ignorance of theater, yet they allow him to commission a mural for his factory. Meanwhile, Manie and Clara struggle to pay the rent and contemplate a surrender to domestic servitude while Angélique's Martha Stewart life begins to unravel.

Jaoui's film stumbles at first (too many characters, perhaps) but turns out to be one of the most pleasing and provocative ensemble pieces to come out of France in the past decade (like My Sex Life, only with not so much sex, or Late August, Early September, only with not so much self-destruction). Jaoui's directorial debut (already studded with awards) is astonishing, with none of the self-conscious conceits or semiotics found in so much European cinema lately. The actors are all so flawlessly natural they might be improvising, but performances this fine are anything but casual. At the Avon.
-- Peg Aloi